'Project Nimbus': A questionable AI project by Google to further suppress Palestinians

The Palestine-Israel conflict, throughout eras, has seen many new twists and turns. Ever since the inception of the Jewish state, it has been accused multiple times of using many different types of discriminatory and torturous measures against the Palestinians, something Israel has always denied, calling most of these actions defensive.

With the advent and progress of technology, the Israeli government has often developed new and unprecedented techniques for suppressing the Palestinians. Project Nimbus is the latest in this regard. 

In collaboration with Google, the Israeli government has undertaken this program, where they will be able to extract the entire personal history of a particular Palestinian just by looking at his face. The supposed budget of this ambitious AI project is about 1.2 billion US dollars.

The inception of this project kicked off in the year 2021 when the Israeli finance ministry declared that they had signed a cloud computing project with Google for about 1.2 billion dollars, courtesy of which Israel could use all types of facilities provided by Google.

The artificial intelligence technology will be able to tell whether a Palestinian is happy, sad, or even angry, as it can judge the expressions on the human face and interpret whether these expressions are positive or not. 

The sentiment analysis used in the AI will be able to tell what a person is going to do, something that seems straight out of dystopian science fiction but is apparently true.

The Israeli government will now be able to arrest Palestinian citizens whose facial expressions will appear doubtful of their security, which basically is the euphemism for arresting any Palestinian they will feel like. The Israeli government will no longer find it necessary to run programs like 'Operation Blue Wolf' due to the efficiency of this project.

Like all other artificial intelligence technologies, the project Nimbus is susceptible to many errors, making it even more dangerous for the Palestinians, as facial expressions can be miscalculated, leading to further persecution for the Palestinian people.

Many employees of Google have already protested against this artificial intelligence technology being sold to a government that has many questionable activities when it comes to human rights. 

Ariel Koren, who worked as a marketing manager for Google, was quite vocal against it, which got her kicked out of Google by the higher-ups.

Although the involvement of Google is not necessarily seen frequently in such questionable premises, Project Nimbus is going to tarnish this relatively clean image of Google. It also reminds us of the extent to which states can go to suppress a section of their population.

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